F-Zero Climax / YMMV

Breather Level:
- In Survival mode, the "Straight" stages are freebie stages. They are each set on one of the three variants of Mute City: Straight Link, which is just a straight line. If you perform a rocket start (which does require timing, but becomes effortless if you unlock Rocket Start Accelerate), you've pretty much already won; if you're not confident with your rocket start timing, you can just do a cold start and boost to catch up and overtake easily. Straight Link II features short lateral strips of slow zones in an attempt to mix things up, but the speed loss is negligible. Even on Straight Link III, which features narrowing sides to bait players who touch the boost arrows, you can just avoid them and boost straight ahead to win.
- In Survival on Battle difficulty, the No Crash challenge on Mute City: Oval. The gimmick is that you have no energy meter so a single tap of the opponent or walls will blow your machine up and trigger a respawn. However, the course itself is a simple round and wide oval with rows of boost arrows, so as long as you're tagging the boost arrows, the race is yours. This changes on Violence difficulty, however, as the No Crash challenge will require you to race on Sand Ocean: Key Break III, a course from Master difficulty in Grand Prix mode.
Critical Backlash: Similar to its predecessor F-Zero: GP Legend, this game ended up being a Franchise Killer as a result of its poor sales due to its association with the ill-received anime and not being as full-bodied as F-Zero GX. Nonetheless, it has a considerable playerbase who regard it as a great pseudo-3D F-Zero game similar to GP Legend, but with a huge selection of courses (54 in total^note). And for those looking to push their skills to their limits, the game features more technical courses than GP Legend's and the addition of new techniques like Boost Fire and Spin Booster, as well as the fastest speeds of any pseudo-3D F-Zero game.
Game-Breaker: The Rocket Start Accelerate function, unlocked simply by completing Survival on Tour difficulty (the easiest difficulty) with Captain Falcon, which should't be too difficult of a task. With this, simply holding A through the starting countdown will guarantee a Boost Fire start, without needing to time the press, while acting as a regular accelerator afterwards. Never hear "3, 2, 1, FIRE!!" ever again!
Nintendo Hard: This is perhaps the hardest of the pseudo-3D F-Zero games with its outstandingly technical courses and difficult drifty physics that can send one repeatedly crashing into walls, even if they use techniques developed from previous games unless they master this game's specific techniques. It introduces some new features like Boost Fire and Spin Booster...that you are expected to utilize to their fullest to have a fighting chance.
Scrappy Mechanic: The Level Editor allows you to share courses with a password, if the option to do so via Link Cable is not available. A great idea in theory, since it means courses can be exchanged without much infrastructure needed, but depending on the length of the course, passwords can over be a hundred characters long for a single course; in fact, the passwords for larger courses are so long they actually scroll the screen. And since this is a Game Boy Advance game (as opposed to being on a platform with keyboard compatibility), that means you have to slowly input each character one at a time. Hope you've got a lot of patience or emulator savestates.
Sequel Difficulty Spike: Players coming from F-Zero: GP Legend expecting this game to be just GP Legend with a new set of courses are in for a rude awakening. The physics are different and generally regarded as more difficult, opponent AI is more aggressive, and the new courses are more challenging and expect mastery of the game's controls to navigate, from a wider spread of hazardous terrain types to tricky booster and pit area placement that require memorization to develop optimal routes throughout each course. The shorter race length, with races now being three laps long instead of five, can be a blessing in terms of needing less time to concentrate, but it also gives you less room for error if you make a mistake.
That One Level: Has a page shared with the rest of the series here.

YMMV / F-Zero Climax

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